COLUMN: 'Unique' Duke team had its share of problems

Saturday

Mar 22, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 22, 2014 at 11:00 PM

Brett Friedlander

RALEIGH – Mike Krzyzewski has a term he’s used to describe his Duke basketball team throughout the 2013-14 season. He’s called it “unique.” And that’s not necessarily a compliment. What he really means is flawed.

To his credit, Krzyzewski found ways of working around his Blue Devils’ shortcomings to fashion yet another successful season – including at one point, substituting in five-man platoons. But regardless of how knowledgeable and accomplished a coach he is, and he’s among the best ever, there was only so much he could do.

As the old saying goes, you can’t teach height. Nor is there any real substitute for experience.

Those two factors haunted Duke on numerous occasions this season, especially down the stretch in close games. They ultimately proved to be the young Blue Devils’ undoing Friday in a stunning 78-71 opening-round NCAA tournament loss to Mercer. Although Duke was able to use its superior athleticism to dominate the offensive boards and score 23 second-chance points, its lack of a true inside presence forced it into attempting a season-high 37 3-point shots.

Its inexperience also came into play during the final five minutes when, after appearing to be on the verge of taking control, it allowed the senior-laden Bears to score 11 unanswered points to rally for the upset.

“I’ve said all year, we’re not that good,” said Krzyzewski, whose team finished third in the ACC and ends the season with a 26-9 record. “We can beat a lot of people, but we can (also) be beaten by people.”

That was especially true during an early January stretch in which Duke lost two of its first three ACC games while Krzyzewski was admittedly distracted by the death of his beloved older brother Bill. Both the coach and his team eventually refocused themselves to right the ship and win nine of their next 10. But in the end, the Blue Devils were only able to go as far as stars Jabari Price and Rodney Hood could take them.

Both did an admirable job of carrying their team with Hood, a sophomore transfer from Mississippi State, averaging 16.4 points and Parker leading in both scoring and rebounding on his way to the Wayman Tisdale Award as the nation’s top freshman.

Rarely, though, did the two have a big game at the same time. A regular season ending win against rival North Carolina at Cameron Indoor Stadium marked only the fifth time the two scored 20 or more points in the same game.

While the Blue Devils were usually able to get by with one or the other playing well, they weren’t as lucky on those rare occasions in which both struggled. Friday was one of those days. Not even hot shooting performances by guards Quinn Cook and Rasheed Sulaimon could overcome the combined 6 for 24 effort posted by Parker and Hood against Mercer.

Afterward, a tearful Parker placed the blame for his team’s unexpected early NCAA exit onto his own shoulders by saying he had “to be a man about it … I have to take the responsibility.”

The reality, however, is that the Blue Devils would never have gotten as far as they did without their freshman star.

In contrast to Duke’s last one-and-done freshman Austin Rivers, Parker did everything he could to put the team above himself. His greatest sacrifice was playing inside, where at 6-foot-8, 235 pounds, he was by far the Blue Devils’ biggest and bulkiest player.

He ended up leading the ACC in rebounds at 8.8 per game to go along with a 19.3 scoring average. The only others capable of passing as post players were slender 6-9 sophomore Amile Jefferson and the lightly-used duo of Marshall Plumlee and Josh Hairston.

“We’re a very unconventional team this year in that the only time we had an inside presence is if Jabari was really strong inside and he did that a lot,” Krzyzewski said. “But that’s not really what he does. That’s not his strength, so we’re always not real strong inside. “I mean, warming up when we went for a jump ball, you can see that usually another team was bigger than we were. We tried to counteract that by (doing) different things we did offensively and defensively, and overall, it worked well.”

But not well enough. As a result, the Blue Devils were sent packing from the opening round of the NCAA tournament for the second time in three years. The good news for Duke, however, is that help is on the way.

Among its biggest victories this season were the ones that came in February when two of the nation’s best high school seniors – big man Jahlil Okafor and point guard Tyus Jones – signed letters of intent to help Krzyzewski land the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class.

Together with solid veterans Sulaimon, Cook and an improving Jefferson, their arrival figures to make the Blue Devils the team to beat in the ACC next season even if Parker and Hood leave for the NBA draft as expected.

Then again, as this “unique” season proved, nothing is guaranteed. That’s just the nature of college basketball these days.

“Year-to-year, (even) a program that’s been fortunate enough to have the stature we’ve had over these last three decades (is) going through constant change,’ Krzyzewski said. “Constant change. We have to be very adaptable to that change. Hopefully we make the adjustments, adapt well and give our teams a chance to try to win a national championship.”

ACC Insider Brett Friedlander can be reached at starnewsacc@gmail.com

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